If this is your first visit, be sure to
check out the FAQ by clicking the
link above. You may have to register
before you can post: click the register link above to proceed. To start viewing messages,
select the forum that you want to visit from the selection below.

Shut up about Barclay Perkins - UK Beer Exports 1937 - 1949

Between the wars UK beer exports trundled along at between 200,000 and 350,000 barrels annually. Which was about half the level it had been pre-WW I, when 500,000 to 650,000 barrels were exported each year.

Clearly the war was going to have an impact on exports. Especially as one of the main destination for UK exports, Belgium, had been occupied by the Germans. In addition, German U-boats made shipping anything across the Atlantic a dangerous enterprise. And in the early phases of the war British shipping in the Mediterranean was susceptible to German or Italian attacks from the air. Plus most shipping capacity was reserved for war material or essential items, such as food.

Given all these negative factors, it’s no shock that beer exports shrank considerably in the early years of the war:

Belgium appears to have been receiving supplies if British beer right up until the Germans invaded. The trade didn’t resume until a couple of years after war’s end. The quantity of beer going to British colonies dried to a trickle between 1942 and 1944.

Exports hit a nadir in 1942, a year when the war was only just starting turn in the Allies’ favour.

Not all the export markets were as large after the war as they had been before. India and the Straits Settlements, for example, were taking less than half the beer they had done pre-war. In the case of India, this was doubtless due to the withdrawal of British troops and administrators after independence in 1947. Belgium, on the other hand, imported similar quantities as pre-war. While more beer was shipped to the West Indies after the war than before it.

In the 1950s, UK exports stabilised at around 250,000 barrels a year – similar to what they had been in 1939. Though the destinations changed, as the British Empire slowly withered away and with it the former colonial markets.